CHOICES

I believe this: even if man had the capacity to live forever, he wouldn’t. For there is a way in which Life is not just the function of a beating heart; there is a way in which it is only the function of the will to live on. So, when I was asked that terrible question, ‘But how do you KNOW she’s THE ONE?’ I didn’t hesitate. I said, ‘I don’t.’ What I really meant to say was ‘there is no proof’, not in the swing of her hips, or the way the thought of her makes me stop in the middle of the street and laugh to myself; all dependable indicators, yes, but none that incontrovertible proof they were asking for, that this thing I was getting into was unbreakable.

It’s my greatest epiphany, you see. I used to wake up at night and wonder, ‘What if I wake up at night and it’s gone?’ Don’t lie to me.  If you’ve fallen in love before, you’ve fallen out of love before.  And I dreaded it, THAT moment, when the stone that had been hurtling upwards all this time begins to slow. Ah! How do you break the news to the other, that they are no longer ‘the one’? Do you search for lies when they ask, ‘But what did I do?’  Or tell the truth, ‘Nothing’? And what if you’ve had kids with them already, built this complicated life together already? Yes. What if it’s the morning of your fiftieth?

I used to have these thoughts… Then I said to myself – ‘Dike; feelings, like tides, will rise and fall but Love, surely, must be something more’. So, let’s ask a different set of ‘What ifs..?’ What if you took it all away; stripped it of every sonnet, every violin in the background, every gold-tinted sunset and gentle, meandering path? What if you ground it down to its irreducible minimum? Surely, there would be something left, something that held true regardless of who. Parent, friend, lover or your own child, something common to each instance you’ve ever said it, and meant it, ‘I love you.’ If Love lives at all, surely, it must be in that common denominator.

So let me hold on to what is real for a moment. You see, I have no fears of waking up one morning and ‘not loving’ my mother ‘any more’, or of discovering after many years that I don’t ‘actually’ love my daughter. And, yes, you could say, ‘Of course you wouldn’t, they’re your blood’, but in this same world there are those who creep into the beds of their own children. No. That bond you speak of is not in our genes. It’s in our heads. It’s in the things we’ve been raised to accept without question: you love your mother even if she’s a witch, you stand by your brothers, you take care of your father when his strength is gone, and if (God forbid) your child is born with six fingers and two toes, you kiss her gently still and say, ‘You are more beautiful than art, I swear.’

Yes. Regardless of how Walt Disney likes to end those fairytales of his, there are actually no ‘feelings’ that last forever. Don’t let anyone fool you. This is the nearest we will ever come to it, to make up our minds, independently of anything they are or will ever be, that come what may, no matter what, each time they look to us they WILL find succor. For at its core that is what it is, not a poem or a song or a colony of butterflies in the pit of your stomach, just a line you draw in the sand and refuse, thereafter, to step over. Love is a choice; more than a choice, Love is a faith. And I believe.

Image taken from:

http://www.bhmpics.com/walls/love_butterflies-wide.jpg